On Formalism

Formalism is supposed to prevent violence, but instead encourages violence, in particular rare but catastrophic large-scale violence. It is supposed to be the political-formula-free formulation, but cashes out to right of conquest.

unrelated galaxy cakes

It's Istanbul, not Constantinople, been a long time gone Constantinople.

— Lance Vader (@LanceVader) October 12, 2017

As a good formalist, we accept that it's nobody's business but the Turk's. However, this raises the question of why it's their business, and the answer is they marched a large army into Istanbul. Hence, formalism, far from being a solution to violence, actively endorses it. If you dislike a power distribution, all you need to do is formally declare war on it and win, whereupon the formalist will dutifully switch to your side.

Insofar as the war is indeed won, this is actually fine. It's a proof that the prewar formalist beliefs about who owns what was mistaken, and the war kindly corrected it.

The problem is that humans are manically optimistic. Wars frequently occur because of illusory opportunities. Hence, formalism in fact encourages the exact thing it is supposed to discourage. The only actual deterrent that's been found is to bodily threaten the person in charge of declaring wars. For example, pointing a nuclear missile at their face. (I suggest cryptographically signed assassination technologies as a cheaper and cleaner alternative.) Absent such deterrents, unwinnable wars are declared all the time, which cause vast destruction before the overoptimistic human in charge gets the message.

As a bonus, because political formulae are perverse, formalism encourages progressivism or other Sophist phenotypes. If you say coercion-legitimizing status comes from beating somebody up, then the true elite shows themselves by coercing someone without laying a finger on them and getting away with it, that is, using rhetoric.

By contrast, the anarchist formula of Exit (short ver.) implements the only other deterrent for war: disallowing coercion-legitimizing status and/or making the person who declares the war also pay for the war. War is obviously unprofitable; demand simply isn't high enough. I am curious to see how Exit's perversity would play out. If it's bad, I'm officially anarcho-pessimist.

As an aside, formalism also has two moral norms - violence is bad, and lying is bad. Moral norms have a poor track record as political engineering constraints. This is unsurprising given that moral nihilism obtains.

Why I Am Not a Nationalist

Nationalists want to be ruled by someone like them.

Problem: the plebs, always and everywhere, are fucked. If they could rule, they wouldn't be plebs.

The rulers aren't like you, even if they look like you and speak like you. Who do you think let in all the foreigners in the first place?

Ancien Feminism: Courtly Love

So, uh, fun fact: modern feminism is 900 years old. It's traditional.

As per my hobby horse, the 'dark' ages ended with the conquest of Toledo in 1085, which released Greek and Roman works from the library there into Christian Europe. The virulence of the Sophist virus can be seen in how very immediately the idea of Courtly Love infected the place. (As an aside, the first scientist also appeared, in the form of Robert Grosseteste.)

It is a mistake to blame Eleanor of Aquitaine (pictured) for the disaster. As soon as Sophism appears, there's a feminism-shaped hole in the world, which will be filled by a convenient woman. Doubtless there had been several similar attempts during the 'dark' ages, but without refined rhetorical arts, their ridiculousness was apparent.

I feel like I should have known about this. It's four years old, an eternity at internet communication speeds, but I didn't, so it's time for some antifisking. I'm actually glad I didn't find it earlier, because I can read far more meaning into it now than I could have four years ago. Do read the original, as I'm going to skip any part I can't add to.

The key thing is that these Troubadours were not some “traveling band” singing for their supper. Maybe later, but at this time, they were major nobles, from both the nobility and the higher noble classes.

Courtly love, as per the name, started as an ultra-high-class vice. It's only late in the game, mid 1700s, that it filtered down to the plebs, and the final collapse occurred fifty years ago. Feminism is the very opposite of an egalitarian grassroots movement, and is particularly poorly suited to the capacities of your average Jane.

The issue at the time, was that, as the historians state, that “Love as we know it did not exist. Marriage was as much as about land and politics as anything else”. It was said you “Married a fiefdom and a wife got thrown in the bargain”.

This, as it turns out, is a bad idea. Psychotic androcentrism results in psychotic gynocentrism. (Which results in psychotic androcentrism, which...) Proof: you've read the news before, yes?

On the plus side, high-functioning autism has few troubles reproducing in such an environment. (Low functioning autism gets infanticided, exposed, lynched, or burned as a heretic.)

And it was thought that due to the “wickedness” of women, it was probably superior to remain a virgin. And thus the idea of the “celibate” priest was born. He could not be “godly”, and should be suspect, if he allowed himself to come under the temptation of women.These guys were definitely the “Red Pill” writers of the time. The general idea was not so much that sex was bad, but women were so bad, and sex was lure, the hook, so they damned sex as a means to keep men from getting ensnared in the traps and wickedness that women lay for men. And the thought has a little bit of merit, I must say. 

So, think about this. The men in power at the time, saw some of the stuff we see, and they gave a huge “thumbs down” on women. Huge.

That is, autistics reproduce (and fail to fall for Sophism) unless you allow gay men to get out of the dynamic by agitating for celibate monasteries, which naturally attract scholarly-minded autistics. Remember, gay men find vaginal sex almost as disgusting as straight men find a gay blowjob. Basically, they'll do it in prison, and that's part of what makes it a prison. With sodomy strictly banned and marriage not particularly up to either bride or groom, gays will desperately agitate for a way out. In this cause, Paul's struggle with his nymphomania becomes a useful tool.

This is more of the overreaction-overreaction cycle. To put it bluntly, while women can indeed be troublesome, to react with doctrinaire celibacy is to be a beta cuck. Solve the problem, don't run like a worthless coward.

So, basically dark ages MGTOW. Shit's not new. That said, MGTOW is now a rational response to state distortions of the marriage market. Doctrinaire celibacy is not the same as a personal calling to celibacy.

So she accompanied him down there and was the defacto “regent” during his “minority”. [...]  

The same thing happened at the same time in about 3 other major places in the area,

Awfully coincident...or rather, proof that it happened all the time, but only after the reconquest of Toledo did it spawn disease.
Further, even before proto-feminism, Hajnal Europe didn't really have a problem with women becoming powerful. Psycho androcentrism isn't consonant with the European character.

“Women are the love. Women give praise to men and the power of that praise is the driving motivator of men. All good things that men do are only done in the true spirit of love to earn the right to the love that the woman confers to the men. Women define what is good. Women confer status on men by allowing them to receive the love they receive from women as a result of high character and accomplishment”.

There is a problem in that patriarchy is a fact. Men can oppress women whenever and to whatever extent they desire. A single man can often overpower an entire mob of women, sometimes simply by being willing to attempt it. As a result, courtly love must have something to offer men, and you can find it here.

"Women define what is good." Surely, this is almost how it works in heaven.

This has been a problem since the axial age, when men realized mere material success is a bit weaksauce. Physics is not the arbiter of the good. Since it is possible to combine material failure with nonmaterial success, how is the man to judge his own goodness? How does he avoid fooling himself into thinking he is virtuous when he is not? One requires an external standard. 

In heaven, a man who is in fact good is judged by an infallible judge, whereupon he is granted a wife whose beauty and devotion parallels his achievements. I'm not an expert, so do check with your local astronomer, but unfortunately I suspect we live on Earth, not the heavens. Most women are particularly terrible judges of character. Sexual success is a particularly monochrome version of material success.

(Do note my considered use of the word 'devotion.')

They actually created these things called “The Court of Love”. And these men and women, and you can imagine the men in those courts were the 12th or 13th century equivalents of Manginas, would literally “rule” on love.

The French did garner a reputation as being good lovers, and you know what they say about stereotypes. It wasn't a pure waste.

And Gentlemen never demand sex. Which of course, all of this was bullshit.

I do like having these things spelled out, so let me spare you the link surfing to find it: this is a manual for creating beta orbiters and one anointed alpha fuckboy. Since everything is 'secret' the betas don't see that one tryst is not like the others. One of these trysts does not belong. Since gentlemen don't demand sex, then the alpha 'gentleman' must also not be demanding sex. Not that he needs to.

Meanwhile, a bunch of betas get to prove their restraint. Which is a genuine virtue...that nobody else cares about.

And we begin by rejecting unilaterally, out of hand, “love” for the pack of lies it is. [...]

And I say, no it doesn’t. It exposes the reality of the impossibility of “love” because “love” is entirely a manufactured ideal.  

Jordan B. Peterson says the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is about the awakening of human consciousness. One must feel before one can suffer. As the event which cast humans out of Eden, Christians have a habit of attempting to jam this genie back into the bottle. However, it is in consciousness that Man is made in the image of God. God is pure, perfect consciousness. Nous and Logos. Perception so intense it becomes direct power. Man is always surprised to find that trying to deny he has feelings, such as love, result in bestial outcomes.

Basically Satan loves it when you start thinking wisdom is merely the opposite of folly.

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There's a wide range of companion pieces I could choose, but I choose this one, on the history of chivalry.

This is a link.

Note the pre-corrupt code of chivalry wasn't too hot either. It's impossible to con an honest man. Nobody is completely honest, but corrupting chivalry was just easy. However, there is this wonderful opportunity for amusement.
"Is chivalry dead?"
*Look confused.* "You want me to protect the Church and smash the infidel? Err...right now?"
Optional: comments about where to find a gun and one's ability to aim.
It's not like it's hard. A bunch of infidels have been imported, so you rarely have to travel far to find one to smash.

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The synthesis positions is obvious, is it not? Practice Game within a strict marriage. Perhaps garnish with anti-slut certification. Also, very high status men are going to have more than one wife, whether it's allowed or not, so give it up and allow it.

Not Keen on Steve Keen Economics: Ricardo Stands

I doubt it will help, but let's murder Steve Keen a little, just in case I'm wrong.

This belief in the advantages of specialization lies behind the incredulity with which economists have reacted to the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom’s vote for Brexit. They have, at their most self-righteous, blamed the rise of anti-globalization sentiment on the public’s irrational failure to appreciate the net benefits of trade. 

Do I see where this is going? Keen is going to flagrantly ignore that price-controlled American labour is competing on a 'level' field with uncontrolled foreign labour. (P.S, he did.) In any case, official economists are shills, they're arguing that proggies should get everything they want. E.g. since State isn't allowed to meddle with domestic affairs, it has to entangle Americans with foreigners, so it can meddle indirectly.

he treated the specialized machinery in different industries as if it were equally as liquid (and so could be as easily repurposed) as the money with which it had been purchased

In reality factories are retooled all the time. It's not as liquid as money, sure. Money is a tool specifically optimized for liquidity. Further, regardless of how liquid such things are, the liquidity can be priced into the prospective profit calculation when they plan to build a factory. I guess Keen is signalling that he's such a rarefied academic that the existence of accountants routinely slips his mind.

The archetypal machines for cloth and wine manufacturing in Ricardo’s time included the spinning jenny and the wine press. It is stating the obvious that one cannot be turned into the other, but stating the obvious is necessary, because the easy conversion of one into the other was assumed by Ricardo, and has been assumed ever since by mainstream economic theory.

Hmm?

This is a confusion of monetary capital (which Ricardo, as a stockbroker by trade, knew intimately) with the physical machinery in factories (about which he knew very little).

Keen's list of things about which he knows very little; accountants, ships. Did you know you can put a wine press on a ship, and have the ship carry it to Portugal?

Machinery designed for one industry simply cannot move to any other, even in the same country; but machinery in one industry can (and frequently is) shipped between countries.

What? Oh, I see. Keen's not even wrong. This whole section had no point.

Had there been any English vineyards, they and their attendant machinery would have been rendered worthless and scrapped.

A straight contradiction. Shipping is possible. Also, when convenient, not possible. This is why, when you're engaged in sophistry, it's a bad idea to admit to knowing things. You can pass it off as an oversight if you haven't previously admitted to knowing that machines can be shipped.

Around this time a competent economist would have brought up the concept of shocks. Like any organism, the economy reacts poorly to shocks, no matter how liquid the capital stock under consideration. A sudden opening of trade is a bad idea, almost as bad as a sudden closing.

Whether the aggregate production of wine and cloth increased or decreased now depended both on economies of scale and the macroeconomic effects of changes in trade policy.

This is going to be a red herring, isn't it.

(P.S, it was. Keen does not appear to have any position on what the macroeconomic effects would be, other than that they would be low-status.)

If the Portugese wine fields have good economies of scale, then England would get cheaper wine. (Once the effects of the shock dissipate.) If they don't, then England's wine fields won't get scrapped in the first place.

It's far more likely that Ricardo did think of this, but didn't think it was worth mentioning. Because it wasn't. Keen is playing a dumb gotcha, and dumb gullible half-illiterates are all like, "Yeah, my enemies* should be punished! What Keen said!" *(read foreigners)

Economists have considered this issue to some extent (work in this area led to Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize in 2008)

>approvingly quoting Krugman
Face, meet palm. I think I need a pad on my desk to avoid head scars.

Ricardo set the standard in a tangential observation about one potential riposte to his case: if Portugal were genuinely better at everything than England, would not English industry simply decamp from England and move holus bolus to Portugal if free trade were allowed? He conceded that it could do so, but then asserted that, if this happened, it would be advantageous not merely to English capitalists but to English and Portuguese consumers as well:  

At least this is dumb in a complicated way.

Keen wants you to imagine that Ricardo is hypothesizing that all English industry moves to Portugal, and that the English simply sit around in fine linens sipping wine all day, with no tedious work to be done. Proven impossible by inspection, therefore Ricardo must be insane, right?

Ricardo already proved that this wouldn't happen if the only industries were wine and weaving. Keen did not attack this in any substantive way. Keen must be deliberately omitting critical context, to form a bait-and-switch.

On the issue of the relocation of production from high-wage First World to low-wage Third World countries, modern economists have pushed Ricardo’s Vice past even Ricardo’s limits. While he did contemplate the possibility of capitalists moving production offshore, Ricardo was of the opinion that this was both unlikely and undesirable:

"Ricardo was admirably xenophobic."

the fancied or real insecurity of capital, when not under the immediate control of its owner 

Accountants routinely price such risks into prospective profit statements.

Rhetoric does not decide whether Ricardo was correct or incorrect. If the risk of foreign investments, as accounted, does not overwhelm the additional profits, then the home country will monetarily profit by such investments. This is an objective accounting fact. Keen is implying that you shouldn't do it anyway, because foreigners are icky. You wouldn't want to be caught saying foreigners aren't icky, now would you?

The theory of comparative advantage would lead you to expect that in a world with very low trade barriers—basically the modern globalized world—most countries would have specialized trade profiles, so that they would score low in both ubiquity and diversity. This proved to be true of underdeveloped economies like Ghana, in which the top three exported products—fuels, precious metals, and cocoa—make up 81 percent of its exports. But it was not true of advanced economies like Germany,

Actually I wouldn't expect that, for myriad reasons.
This is a common trick, where Keen says something plausible, relying on the (reliable) fact the reader won't think about it carefully, if at all. And by 'common' I mean I expect better. This is low-class sophistry.

If you do think about it carefully, this fatally undermines Keen's point. He said earlier that open wine trade with Portugal would destroy England's (hypothetical) wine industry. (And this is bad because negative halo.) He says in this passage that the modern world has low trade barriers, as Ricardo wanted. Yet industries are not being destroyed. Uh, oops.

In short, "We need trade barriers to get complex economies, also, despite no trade barriers, we have complex economies." Yeah, great job Keen. Keep it up. (In reality trade barriers aren't that low.)

Here's a genuinely curious fact: Canada and America export substantial amounts of electricity to each other. I believe this is true of many other commodities. Trade must be sufficiently open, or they would be unable, yet regional specialization does not appear to be occurring, or if it is, it's occurring far below the scale of the federal jurisdiction. In any case, I certainly wouldn't have predicted it, and were Keen able to explain it, I would be grateful, despite his numerous intellectual sins. However, because I'm aware of this curious result, I wouldn't be so bold as to make specific industry level-prediction about English linens and Portugese wines in real life until I find out what's going on with North American electricity.

Keen isn't here for curiosity, though, he's here to make soldier-arguments for his side.

Steve Keen is not an economist. He is a Sophist. He employs economist-flavoured rhetoric, which politicians use if they dislike who he's throwing shade on. Keen chooses his shading targets based on who he wants to be friends with. If he ever says anything factually accurate, it's a coincidental accident.

I don't think Vox Day is actually dumb enough to fall for this nonsense. I believe he's exploiting the under-served 'foreigners are icky' propaganda market.

In the United States today, financial fraud is de-criminalized

Michael Hudson isn't such a great fan of banking:

In the 1960s, banks required a 25-30% down payment by the buyer, and limited the burden of mortgage debt service to only 25% of the borrower’s income. But interest is now federally guaranteed up to 43% of the home buyer’s income. And by 2008, banks were making loans no down payment at all. Finally, loans in the 1960s were self-amortizing over 30 years. Today we have interest-only loans that are never paid off.

So banks loan much more of the property’s market price. That is why most of the rental value of land isn’t paid to the homeowner or commercial landlord any more. It’s paid to the banks as interest.   

[...] 

The problem with the savings and loan crisis was mainly fraud! The large California S&L’s were run by crooks, topped by Charles Keating.  Many were prosecuted for fraud and sent to jail. By the 1980s the financial sector as a whole had become basically a criminalized sector. My colleague Bill Black has documented most of that. He was a prosecutor of the S&L frauds in the 1980s, and wrote a book “The best way to rob a bank is to own one”. [...] Fraud was the main financial problem, and remains so. 

[...] 

These were essentially junk mortgages, and once again it was fraud. Already in 2004 the FBI said that the American economy was suffering the worst wave of bank fraud in history. Yet there was no prosecution. Essentially in the United States today, financial fraud is de-criminalized. No banker has been sent to jail, despite banks paying hundreds of billions of dollars of fines for financial fraud. These fines are a small portion of what they took illegally. Such paymets are merely a cost of doing business. The English language was expanded to recognize junk loans. Before the financial crash the popular press was using the word “junk mortgages” and “Ninjas”: “No Income, No Jobs, no Assets”. So everybody knew that there was fraud, and the bankers knew they would not go to jail, because Wall Street had become the main campaign contributer to the leading politicians, especially in the Democratic party. The Obama Administration came in basically as representatives of the bank fraudsters. And the fraud continues today. The crooks have taken over the banking system. It is hard for Europeans to realize that that this really has happened in America. The banks have turned into gangsters, which is why already in the 1930s President Roosevelt coined the word “banksters”. 

[...] 

Most of the houses that were foreclosed on have been bought out by hedge funds for all cash. In the wake of 2008, by 2009 and 2010 hedge funds were saying “If you have $5,000,000 to invest, we’re going to buy these houses that are being sold at distress prices. We’re going to buy foreclosed properties for all cash, because we can make a larger rate of return simply by renting them out.” So there has been a transfer of property from homeowners to the financial sector. The rate of home-ownership in America is dropping.

The economy itself has not recovered. All economic growth since 2008 has accrued only to the top 5% of the economy. 95% of the economy has been shrinking by about 3% per year… and continues to shrink, because the debts were kept in place. President Obama saved the banks and Wall Street instead of saving the economy.

Don't get your hopes up about his solutions, though.

Government Successfully Evades Blame

To my surprise, I've collected all the ways the government is directly causing America's most serious employment problems, and blaming automation and foreigners taking your jobs. (Logically equivalent to automation.) Alternatively, blaming capitalism in general.

Fun fact: automation increases wealth. More stuff / same number of people = more stuff per person. Alternatively you can make the same amount of stuff in less time, but have more leisure. E.g. 30 hour weeks for everyone, but with the same standard of living as the previous 40.  Equally foreigners. If they're making all your stuff, you can relax or do something else on top of having all your stuff. Of course that's not what we're seeing. The problem is the government has made productive work illegal. 

Automation's effect on wealth causes deflation. Same number of dollars / more stuff = fewer dollars per stuff. That includes your wage, so you should be taking a pay cut. However, the minimum wage exists, so you can't take a pay cut. "I don't work for minimum wage!" Doesn't matter. The programmer has to be paid more than the roofer who must be paid more than the janitor. Otherwise, why not simply skip the skill investment and take the simple indoor job? Because the janitor can't take a pay cut, the roofer can't take a pay cut, which means the programmer can't take a pay cut.

Your wage is price controlled, meaning there's a glut of labour on the market, or equivalently a shortage of jobs. Your employer wants to replace your overpriced ass with a machine, or with foreign non-controlled labour. The wage cut is taken on average instead on each individual, by firing roughly that percentage of the labour force. The government successfully blames this on the automation which the employer uses in response to the anti-human government policy. (Anthrophobic?)

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The government is continually raising regulatory overhead. Either your employer sells your widgets for the same price and takes compliance costs out of your wage, or they sell fewer widgets and must shrink, disemploying the lowest productivity employee, which one day will be you. As mentioned previously, you can't take a pay cut, so they have to shrink. The government is continually shifting jobs 'out of the money' so to speak, in this fashion.

Because much of this regulatory overhead is a fixed per-employee cost, there's a very strict band of competitive hours per week for wage labour. Used to be exactly 40 with no overtime, and now it's a half-inch below the Obamacare full time guidelines. When available leisure increases, hours cannot change, meaning the leisure is taken on average instead, just like the pay cuts are taken on average. The unemployed 'benefit' from 100% of the leisure increase, while the wagecuck gets nothing.

In addition, the government simply outlaws low-status jobs from time to time, such as when the EPA's clear stream act made it impossible to mine coal. (Trump is supposed to have reversed it.)

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The other price control is interest rate control.
Take out an interest to start or fund a business. Pay 2% interest, because ZIRP. The firm makes 7% profit, and at sufficient scale the 5% is plenty for paying executive salaries and other dividends. The problem is real inflation is 10%, so the firm is actually losing money. Their gross revenues won't pay for new inputs. This is a wealth furnace. They will have to roll a new loan to pay for operating costs, which the bank is only too happy to provide. They're taking valuable inputs and producing less valuable outputs. They're lighting wealth on fire and the resulting heat makes the GDP look good.

Because it's anti-automation, it's less stuff / same amount of people = inflation. Their operations will cause their profits to drop over time, until they go out of business. When enough of these firms go out of business at once, there's a recession. The econometrics catch up to the reality that the economy has been shrinking, and as the metrics quickly move toward reality, it looks like a sudden event. (This is what Mises etc. mean by praxaeology and first principles being superior to naive measurement. If you rely on the econometrics you will never figure out what's going on or how to fix it.)

The bank itself is one of these wealth furnaces. The bailouts show that they indeed go out of business from time to time, whereupon the government subsidizes their operation. Overall it's a complicated scheme for turning taxpayer money into sinecures.

Twitter and Reddit are exactly these wealth-furnace corporate welfare schemes, they will last as long as the government feels like subsidizing them, and exactly that long. That's more or less why they're radically left-wing. There were more right-wing corporate welfare proposals, but the government decides not to subsidize those ones, so they go out of business. Similarly, Twitter knows that if it veers too far right, it will lose the coercive sponsor. By contrast, Gab must fund itself through donations.

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Finally, the government is nonproductive, and is now growing faster than the economy in absolute terms, but is still arrogating wealth to itself. Cancer be growing, yo. Meaning, less wealth distributed to the productive sector / same number of people = less wealth per producer. Meaning a pay cut in terms of lifestyle not dollars, instead of a cut in dollars not lifestyle.

As a bonus, as lifestyle drops below the welfare line, previously-productive individuals are shoved into the nonproductive sector, creating nothing but still getting welfare, creating an accelerating positive feedback loop of wage destruction.

Don't forget all these wealth furnaces, which get partial credit for nonproductivity and being part of the government.

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Summary.
The automating employer can't choose to make more stuff but with the same people, it has to choose making the same stuff with fewer people. The leisure is distributed unevenly, and involuntarily.

The regulated employer can't choose to make the same stuff but pay you less, so it makes less stuff and must involuntarily distribute more leisure unevenly.

Productive firms cannot compete with nonproductive firms exploiting the price-controlled interest loophole. Economic activity on average starts destroying stuff - lowing real wages - instead of creating it. Ultimately the wealth furnaces even destroy themselves, again unevenly and involuntarily distributing leisure.

The government directly makes your job unprofitable by growing, involuntarily distributing leisure to you, and distributing wealth away from your slightly more productive peers.

Eventually the government will strangle the economy entirely, and we'll see something like feudalism, state collapse, and, where the voters are really dedicated, famine.

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This is not progressivism. This is not even democracy. This is the natural incentives of every coercive government with the technological capacity to do this. Getting folk put out of work for no reason and getting away with it means you're high status, and gets you laid. Imposing regulations without having to pay for them gets you laid. Raising the minimum wage means you have more dependents and bossing folk around gets you laid. Artificially buggering interest rates gets you a class of sycophants who depend on your largesse and can be expected to obey in return, which gets you laid. Bragging about getting away with having a useless job where you don't have to work gets you laid.

The only reason e.g. China isn't buggering itself these way is because it's busy buggering itself in different ways. When it gets tired of them, it will move on to these sooner or later. Putin resists many of these incentives by force of will. Unless Russians luck out with having an endless series of benevolent psychopaths seizing Putin's position, they will end up buggering themselves like this too.

I begin to speculate that upper-class monogamy substantially slows this process. All this stuff gets you laid, but it's not much use if you're not allowed to get laid by anyone who you're not already getting laid by. Still, the genes think it will create new reproductive opportunities, so it will be pursued regardless, if at a lower intensity.

Prewar Science Was Right About Black Holes

Black holes don't really exist. They are very dark grey approximations of black holes, with no event horizon. I discovered this independently, and found out it was consensus for prewar physics.
I saw credible complaints about my last explanation being unclear, so I'm going to try again.

Postwar science believes objects can cross a black hole's event horizon and join the singular mass. From the infalling object's perspective, this isn't too wrong. However, all prewar physicists /facepalmed simultaneously, because no outside observer - e.g. an astronomer - will ever see an object cross the event horizon. Whether they can cross or not is irrelevant to black hole ontology. As the object approaches the horizon, time dilation increases infinitely. It literally takes forever to touch down. The same thing from another perspective, length contraction approaches infinity, so the object (from our perspective) must cross an infinite amount of space to reach the event horizon.

By symmetry, the infalling object will see the rest of the universe appear to speed up infinitely, and thus see its end before it manages to strike the singularity. All decay mechanics will run to completion, including the decay of the black hole it is falling into. If some analogue of Hawking radiation exists, the falling object will see the black hole retreating from it faster than it can fall in, finally disappearing before it strikes.

The mass originally constituting the black hole also counts as an infalling object. Time dilation increases faster than density as it approaches the critical density. While arbitrary mass can get it arbitrarily close to its Schwarzschild radius, it cannot actually cross before the rest of the universe ends. No black holes can form in the first place.

The objects called black holes are dark because, along with time dilation and length contraction, spatial distortion causes redshift. As the mass approaches arbitrarily close to the critical density, emitted light is redshifted arbitrarily close to nothing. Similarly, any object that's on a path to strike the superdense matter will join its infinitesimally close approach to temporal stasis and redshift oblivion. Equivalently, due to the massive time dilation, the time between each individual photon emission approaches eternity. The flux of conventionally emitted energy falls below the measurement error of any conceivable instrument.

A few consequences: no you don't have to worry about LHC black holes, as it's just regular if superdense matter. There is no information conservation paradox. There is no singularity that needs to be shielded. In other words postwar scientists have managed to make themselves a tremendous amount of unnecessary work.

The Alrenous Power Redistribution Impossibility Theorem

Democracy is socialized power. Instead of a small group being in charge, everyone has a micro slice of being in charge, which add up to some decision when added together. Democracy is impossible.

It isn't natural for power to be evenly distributed. It must be redistributed. Someone must then have the power of redistribution. If they have the power of redistribution, they could redistribute it all to themselves. They are the sovereign.

IF the vote exists THEN power was redistributed THEREFORE power was not redistributed. Impossible by contradiction.
IF the vote doesn't exist THEN democracy does not obtain.

Democracy is logically impossible. The people cannot rule.

Of course the logician can go wrong. I could have accidentally divided by zero somewhere. So let's check.
Sovereigns have a reliable source of security. A sovereign voter would be able to unilaterally defend their right to a vote. As a result it would be impossible to prevent such a person from voting, for any reason. Felons. Noncitizens. Children. Nonhumans.
It would be impossible to recant on the vote procedure. No Hitler. No Stalin. No Kims. No juntas at all, actually.

Checksum complete. There's another one which shows that were democracy real, it wouldn't have to be implemented on purpose. It would simply happen, which is historical nonsense.

It is logically necessary that the vote is an illusion of power. The redistributor maintains the illusion purely to hide their sovereignty. They rely on the fact that doing roughly what the vote says will provide parasitism opportunities disguised as charity. (Ctrl-f 'siphon'.) Modern states are highly sophisticated machines for appearing to do what the vote says while doing things as distant as possible from what the vote says, should the redistributor be in the mood.

(Only the tiniest apologies to Chamley-Judd.)